Thursday, September 22, 2011

Connections

After reading a truly wonderful (or truly awful) book, my first impulse is “I must talk to someone about this!” Then, I probably also need suggestions about what my next read should be. I do this in various ways--talking to coworkers, reading journals, and I subscribe to over twenty kid/ya lit blogs with my read feeder.

When I need nearly instant gratification, however, I use twitter. Twitter is one of my favorite networking and social tools. It’s a great way to connect with people outside of your own institution without having to worry about the travel budget or time away. I have my favorite folks on there, but I also thought I’d see who other people liked:

As you can see, it connected me with some authors and readers I hadn’t connected with before, which is always a lot of fun.

As much as I love using twitter, facebook, and google+, however, I still crave old fashioned face to face time with people, which is why I borrowed a page from Elizabeth Bird’s book and started (with encouragement from Michelle Bayuk and James Kennedy) a Chicagoland Area Kidlit Drink night. As I am writing this, our first outing is still in the future-uture-uture (that was a space/time echo if you weren’t sure), but I am hoping it will be a rousing success. I used a facebook group and my twitter to spread the word, but ultimately the goal is to get everyone in a room and have some great conversations about books, readers, and reading. (I’ll probably be posting a recap, so don’t you fret if you’re desperately curious about how it will go/how it went.)

What about you? After reading a great book, how do you connect with other people? Do you have a book club? A book review blog? Do you gush or rant on twitter or facebook? Let me know!